One cause might be that some of the underlying drivers of performance (of which IQ is but one) correlate with race. For a non-IQ-related example, if your interview process for a basketball team includes a jumping test, this will have a “disparate impact” because on average blacks jump better than whites. Therefore, even if you can demonstrate that you use the jump test because the regression analysis showed it was a good predictor of performance, the usual suspects will scream “algorithmic bias” and now even if you prove (possibly in both a court of law and the court of public opinion) that your regression analysis was correct and valid, you’re still gonna get denounced by someone’s Twitter campaign. Except that that doesn’t happen because the colours are the wrong way round for the outrage mob, and besides the jump test is obvious enough without the regression analysis that people arguing against it sound dumb and people arguing in its favour don’t sound abstruse and sophistic.
But if your defence is that “complicated statistical techniques say this metric predicts performance”, suddenly it’s a lot easier for people to accuse you of *ism as soon as any statistical imbalance shows up in the results of your hiring process.
One cause might be that some of the underlying drivers of performance (of which IQ is but one) correlate with race. For a non-IQ-related example, if your interview process for a basketball team includes a jumping test, this will have a “disparate impact” because on average blacks jump better than whites. Therefore, even if you can demonstrate that you use the jump test because the regression analysis showed it was a good predictor of performance, the usual suspects will scream “algorithmic bias” and now even if you prove (possibly in both a court of law and the court of public opinion) that your regression analysis was correct and valid, you’re still gonna get denounced by someone’s Twitter campaign. Except that that doesn’t happen because the colours are the wrong way round for the outrage mob, and besides the jump test is obvious enough without the regression analysis that people arguing against it sound dumb and people arguing in its favour don’t sound abstruse and sophistic.
But if your defence is that “complicated statistical techniques say this metric predicts performance”, suddenly it’s a lot easier for people to accuse you of *ism as soon as any statistical imbalance shows up in the results of your hiring process.